Did Bill Wyman invent the fretless bass?
To put it mildly, Bill Wyman is something of a complicated figure in The Rolling Stones story. On the one hand, he was a working class, wartime kid from southeast London who helped reinvent how the electric bass guitar was played in the 1960s, contributing for the next 30 years to the sound of the world’s biggest rock band. On the other, his alleged predatory history with women has long tarnished that legacy with much of the Stones’ fan base. He is also technically his own son’s son-in-law, which you may deem worthy of investigating further or a good reason to avoid the whole mess altogether.
In any case, now approaching his 88th birthday — and long married with three grown children — Wyman seems to be entering a new phase of social acceptance, or shared forgetfulness, depending on how you look at it. He recorded with the Stones for the first time in decades on 2023’s Hackney Diamonds, and he’s continued to release solo albums and make appearances at art galleries and other events with little to no pushback. More recently, he’s also been increasingly credited with an important piece of musical history slightly separate from his obvious achievements with the Stones.
The fretless electric bass, which has been designed and manufactured by various companies since the mid-1960s, probably didn’t have a true single inventor. Like a lot of innovations, it’s a story about removing a component from a known quantity rather than manifesting a new one out of thin air, so there were probably dozens of bassists over the years who removed their frets and played without them–maybe for a day, maybe for a week. Not many of them, however, had the platform of a Rolling Stone.
As this particular story goes, a 25-year-old Wyman first stumbled upon his version of fretless bass in 1961 when he was playing in a different band, pre-Stones. He had acquired a buzzy, awful-sounding instrument and had decided to remove the frets and get them replaced when he could afford the cost. In the meantime, though, he discovered what many fretless bass fans still appreciate to this day: the greater freedom and smoother sound enabled by going fret-free (presuming you have the skill to play without guardrails).
It is generally agreed upon in the rock ‘n’ roll grandpa community that Wyman pioneered the mainstream use of the fretless bass once he joined the Stones, with many believing that the instrument makes its recorded debut on the 1964 track ‘Little By Little’.
Wyman would go on to play the fretless bass on numerous Stones hits, but even long after manufacturers started selling their own fretless models, he remained surprisingly unaware of his possible role in actually inventing the instrument.
“I found out years and years later,” Wyman recently explained in a video on his YouTube channel, “Through guitar magazines and people, they said, ‘you invented the fretless bass.’ I said, ‘did I?’ They said, ‘yeah, you were playing the fretless bass in 1961 and ‘62 when you joined the Stones. Your homemade bass.’ I said, ‘yeah.’ They said, ‘well, fretless basses weren’t invented until 1965 or 1966, so you invented the fretless bass.’ I said, ‘oh, well, thanks! Pity I didn’t copyright it!’”
Wyman probably doesn’t desperately need the extra cash influx that a fretless bass patent could have brought him. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting bit of rock history if it can ever be confirmed that he truly pioneered this way of playing, considering that fretless was later adopted by everyone, from Jack Bruce to Jaco Pastorius to Sting.
For Wyman, the goal wasn’t to become an inventor. It was to get the unique sound he wanted.
“That’s why I can sound like a double bass, as well,” he said in his recent video. “I can’t explain the way I play. I can’t explain it vocally. It’s impossible. The only way I can do it is what I did.” Falling short of the verbal explanation, he then mimed a bass line and hummed a doo-doo-doo sound that might as well have been from ‘I’m a King Bee’.
